lways expected to do the thousand indispensable things that
nobody else will do. Upon him fall all the odds and ends, the most
difficult things.

2. After everybody else is through, he has to finish up. His work is like
a woman's,--perpetually waiting on others. Everybody knows how much easier
it is to eat a good dinner than it is to wash the dishes afterwards.
Consider what a boy on a farm is required to do,--things that must be
done, or life would actually stop.

3. It is understood, in the first place, that he is to do all the errands,
to go to the store, to the post office, and to carry all sorts of
messages. If he had as many legs as a centiped, they would tire before
night. His two short limbs seem to him entirely inadequate to the task. He
would like to have as many legs as a wheel has spokes, and rotate about in
the same way.

4. This he sometimes tries to do; and the people who have seen him
"turning cart wheels" along the side of the road, have supposed that he
was amusing himself and idling his time; he was only trying to invent a
new mode of locomotion, so that he could economize his legs, and do his
errands with greater dispatch.

5. He practices standing on his head, in order to accustom himself to any
position. Leapfrog is one of his methods of getting over the ground
quickly. He would willingly go an errand any distance if he could leapfrog
it with a few other boys.

6. He has a natural genius for combining pleasure with business. This is
the reason why, when he is sent to the spring for a pitcher of water, he
is absent so long; for he stops to poke the frog that sits on the stone,
or, if there is a penstock, to put his hand over the spout, and squirt the
water a little while.

7. He is the one who spreads the grass when the men have cut it; he mows
it away in the barn; he rides the horse, to cultivate the corn, up and
down the hot, weary rows; he picks up the potatoes when they are dug; he
drives the cows night and morning; he brings wood and water, and splits
kindling; he gets up the horse, and puts out the horse; whether he is in
the house or out of it, there is always something for him to do.

8. Just before the school in winter he shovels paths; in summer he turns
the grindstone. He knows where there are lots of wintergreens and sweet
flags, but instead of going for them, he is to stay indoors and pare
apples, and stone raisins, and pound something in a mortar. And yet, with
his mind full of